Every now and then, a student faces the task of research paper citation. There are many online articles that explain how to cite a paper in a certain style. You will find so many articles about each style on the Internet. The bad part is that many of those articles suggest different citing ways for a certain style of citation, e.g., MLA in one article might not coincide with the suggested citation of MLA in another article.
The right way is the one supported by your institution, so follow the criteria dictated by your teacher in this regard. The skill of citing a research paper comes with practice. However, there are certain rules that you need to follow in order to cite a research paper correctly:
- Start by asking your teacher which style he/she wants you to follow.
- As a general rule, mention the last name of the author in-text followed by the year of publication of the source in a parenthesis.
- Whether to put a comma in between them or not depends upon the style of citation.
- Do mention the page number the quote is taken from in-text.
- For the end-of-paper bibliography, you need author’s names, year of publication, the title of the research paper, the database or journal in which it was published, its range of pages, URL, DOI, and date you accessed it.
- Organization of this data in the reference depends upon the citation style required by your teacher, so follow that.
How to Cite Sources in a Research Paper in Different Styles
There are different styles of citation that are followed in academic writing. Some of the common styles of citation include APA, MLA, Chicago, Turabian, and Harvard. There is no style of citation that can be called as good or bad. It all depends on the requirement of your institution. If your teacher asks you to cite the research papers in APA, follow the instruction. Citing in MLA or Harvard or any other style gets wrong in this case. You need to understand the rules for citing in all these styles. Here are certain guidelines on citing using different styles:
- If you have once cited the author and work in-text, don’t cite them again while referring to the same work. However, if you go back to information drawn from it after citing other sources, at least mention the name of the author again for clarity.
- If you have cited more than one sources by the same author, and you include information from his/her different sources alternately, also mention the article’s or book’s name along with the author’s name in-text.
- If there are more than three authors, just write the last name of the first author and write “et al.” after it rather than writing down a long list of surnames.
- Certain styles call for lesser For example, you don’t need to write the year of publication in-text in the MLA style of citation, but you have to write it in the APA or Harvard citation style.
What About the Online Citation Generators?
There are many online citation generating websites. The purpose of those websites is to help out students with research papers citation in different styles. While such services are good for simple sources with lesser details like a book or a website, it becomes complicated to get it done through them when the details are more like the chapter of a book, a thesis or a journal paper. Such services ask the students to enter details in particular spaces, e.g., name, year, title, publisher, and other details. Students may not be able to pick these details from the source correctly. Accordingly, the correctness of citation is jeopardized.
Or Just Get It Done by Us!
Citing your paper properly requires skill and practice. If you can learn the different styles and do it yourself, nothing like that! However, as to now, to get done with it, the shortcut you have is of getting it done by us. Just give us a call and tell us which sources you want cited in which style, and we’ll take care of everything for you. Get help with research paper from experts right now!